Goddamn it.
Seriously. Son of a bitch. This always happens. I always show up late to the party, and all that is left in the cooler is some Milwaukee’s Best.
Or you…
It’s the worst to show up late to the party.
It’s even worse if you miss the party altogether, because you never knew it was happening!
We’re on our third day of the government shutdown, which clearly means that there is less institutions being watched, spotted, and monitored.
And here I found out two days ago about this thing called The Silk Road. It sounds like St. Mark’s Street in New York crashed into a King’s Landing market on Westeros with a side of Mafia. Supposedly this thing is like the biggest underground digital black market of stuff. If you want steroids you could get them. If you want a gun-for-hire you could get one. A dragon? Sure. If Walter White’s Ol’ Blue was a real thing you could buy it on The Silk Road.
“How do you know this Heisenberg?”
Then the Government — who is CLOSED — shut down this digital Westeros Market two days ago. And I completely missed the party!
Now, I’m not a purveyor of the drug marketplace, nor a customer of illicit trade, but (without being gross) you have to wonder what the hell else was on that site? It’s like the subway after 1am — you don’t want to be on it, but you’re kind of curious to know what’s on it, and never know what you’re going to find…or what will find you.
Just a dude in a Money Shirt with colorful dreads playing the saxophone to win the heart of this perfect stranger on the S.
Or would the Silk Road have been more like Amazon, where in my shopping cart I’ll buy a book, a video game, a pair of running shoes and Keurig cups? Could I have had, on the Silk Road, a Russian Bride, a trebuchet, a list of usernames and passwords, and a high-tech military walkie-talkie?
And the Constitution. Would have made the movie so much shorter. And better.
And when it came to paying you weren’t using real money. You were using these things called bitcoins. It’s like when you played The Sims and used the cheat to get all of the § –Simoleon Dollars.
I could have called myself a Bitcoin Billionaire. I could have bought and imported two Bugattis from Dubai, along with some ridiculously illegal candy from Japan.
But now I’ll never find out just what kind of crazy things would be on there, and I will never know how far down the rabbit hole goes. Looks like I’m going to have to purchase all of the fun stuff the old fashioned way: another ridiculous kegger at the next UN meeting.
BroCast News 
Your apartment is way too small for a trebuchet.
Don’t listen to that, Eric, you could totally fit a trebuchet in your apartment. You might have to build it in the apartment though, because it’ll never fit through the door.
Your portrayal of the Silk Road and Bitcoins, however, was a sad commentary on the American cultural understanding of economics (and also a fear of freedom, which is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon). The Silk Road was simply a black market–which means free, anonymous, and unregulated by the government. Every transaction on the a black market is entirely voluntary, which means that each transaction benefited every side of the transaction. Because there was no government oversight, there was no taxation. You could have purchased anything that you purchase in your daily life–mozzarella cheese, prosciutto, Barilla pasta, Brill Creme, and so on–just without also being robbed by the government (ie. cheaper). There was absolutely nothing that made the Silk Road a particular haven for drugs or prostitution, other than the fact that drugs and prostitution are completely unavailable on the white (regulated) or grey (person to person transactions that are not strictly legal or regulated, but which the government is not dumb enough to get involved in) markets. The government’s action in this case is simply to suppress completely voluntary, completely honest, and completely beneficial commerce. In other words, the only actor in this case that is acting like the Mafia, is the government.
Also, bitcoins are every bit as “real” a currency as the US dollar (and they’re even legal, for now). The reason they won’t catch on or replace dollars in most cases, is that the government would lose a lot of influence over the economy (particularly super influential monetary policy) if they allowed other currencies to compete with the dollar. Again, just like previous government actions against MTGox and other Bitcoin exchanges and markets, this is about the government protecting its power by suppressing freedom (and particularly trade freedom). Of course, they’re not evil autocrats, as you might envision Hitler to have been, and they think that they can go a great deal of good with this extra power. But both history and economic theory show freedom to have always had better results for more people than government oppression.
Maybe a small trebuchet, but nowhere near the size necessary to mount a successful siege. No, I think we’ll have to settle for a ballista when we start building medieval weapons at Eric’s place.
Ballistas are cooler anyway.
True that, homes.